Chained by legacy applications?

Are you bleeding money on your custom application with expensive maintenance, upgrade and support charges? If I am hitting a sensitive nerve here, I ask for forgiveness. There is a lot to be said for loyalty in life, but applying this loyalty to an outdated system could be holding your organization back.

Before you get the dead wood out, some niggling questions to confront ourselves to move into the direction of a rip-and replace strategy would be:1. Are your current systems still offering anything for your business?2. How practical is it to maintain these systems?3. Is there still sufficient support available for these systems?4. How will you hire new talent to support your outdate system? Do you have documentation ready?

An interesting article on reasons to move away from legacy systems, concurred my theory about a few things. First, maintaining a system may eventually become more expensive than replacing the hardware and software. Second, the lack of security patches within older systems may lead to vulnerabilities and this could put the system at risk of being compromised severely. Third, integration with new systems can be a nightmare.

So the question is what options do you have? When you decide to rip & replace. Your choices are buy and dent your cash flow with another round of custom application development and implementation on premise, alternatively evaluate readymade applications (SAAS) on a pay as you go subscription model so you don’t have a big hole in your pocket. One thing to remember is that the cloud is for everyone, but not for everything!

Only after a thorough assessment of your infrastructure you can determine what’s stays private what goes public. Email Collaboration like moving to Office 365 Exchange online is a no brainer. Fileserver, storage to OneDrive for Business helps you store, share and secure confidential information which can be accessed anywhere you need. Heavy Video Conferencing solutions can be easily replaced with Office 365 Skype for Business.

Moving web apps or hosting websites on Azure is by far most cost effective as you pay on consumption and not a flat fee. On the same note, highly recommend doing application development and testing on public cloud. CRM sales and marketing automation is definitely cloud ready. Custom built applications industry specific or non-industry today can be redesigned on an OPEX consumption model. If you are bound by regulatory, data protection requirements then consider hosting these application on a OPEX utility model on premise or with a hosting partner.

So my friend, take up our quarrel with the foe, The torch be yours to hold it high. So you start to explore your cloud journey today with Microsoft Cloud Solutions.